From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

False documentation is the process of creating
documents which record fictitious events. The documents can then be
used to "prove" that the fictional events happened. A common propaganda tool, false
documentation is often used by management groups and totalitarian governments for four basic
reasons:

to have a basis for accusations against groups or individuals
who oppose those in authority,

Perhaps the best illustration of false documentation is Nazi Germany, where
the authorities falsified documents for all four reasons.

There are three basic methods for falsifying documentation. One
way, of course, is to create an entirely fictional event and write
it down. The other is to misrepresent an actual incident by
embellishment or exaggeration so that the blame for the incident is
misplaced. The third is to refuse to document an actual event,
thereby exonerating the instigators for lack of proof.

The practice of false documentation rests on the fallacy,
promoted by management organizations and governments, that whatever
has been written down is unquestionably true. In business, it rests
on a further bias: the tendency of management to believe managers
rather than to collect and objectively judge evidence. As folkloristJan Harold Brunvand points out,
when a story or a claim appears in print, it gains an air of
authority. Many people are skeptical of spoken rumors, but few
doubt the veracity of stories appearing in the news media.

A related fallacy is, of course, that whatever has not
been documented must not have happened. Of course, absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence. In reality, whether any given
event happened is entirely independent of whether it was
documented.

In George
Orwell's novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth has an entire
department devoted to altering past editions of newspapers in the belief that changing
documentation will change the public's perception of history. One
of the novel's greatest ironies is that the Ministry of Truth deals
exclusively in lies.